to have been the only ancient people that took delight in forests, rivers, and mountains as we do; in reading their descriptions of Nature we are sometimes affected by a mysterious feeling of awe, like a reminiscence of the time when our ancestors lived in India.  Their amorous hyperbole, too, despite its frequent grotesqueness, affects us perhaps more sympathetically than that of the Greeks.  And yet the essentials of what we call romantic love are so entirely absent from ancient Hindoo literature that such amorous symptoms as are noted therein can all be readily brought under the three heads of artificiality, sensuality, and selfishness.

ARTIFICIAL SYMPTOMS

Commenting on the directions for caressing given in the Kama Soutra, Lamairesse remarks (56): 

“All these practices and caresses are conventional rather than natural, like everything the Hindoos do.  A bayaderes straying to Paris and making use of them would be a curiosity so extraordinary that she would certainly enjoy a succes de vogue pour rire.”

Nail-marks on various parts of the body, blows, bites, meaningless exclamations are prescribed or described in the diverse love-scenes.  In Hindoo dramas several of the artificial symptoms—­pure figments of the poetic fancy—­are incessantly referred to.  One of the most ludicrous of them is the drops of perspiration on the cheeks or other parts of the body, which are regarded as an infallible and inevitable sign of love.  Urvasi’s royal lover is afraid to take her birch-bark message in his hand lest his perspiration wipe away the letters.  In Bhavabhuti’s drama, Malati and Madhava, the heroine’s feet perspire so profusely from excess of longing, that the lacquer of her couch is melted; and one of the stage directions in the same drama is:  “Perspiration appears on Madayantika, with other things indicating love.”

Another of these grotesque symptoms is the notion that the touch or mere thought of the beloved makes the small hairs all over the body stand erect.  No love-scene seems to be complete without this detail.  The drama just referred to, in different scenes, makes the hairs on the cheeks, on the arms, all over the body, rise “splendidly,” the author says in one line.[280] A Hindoo lover always has twitching of the right or left arm or eye to indicate what kind of luck he is going to have; and she is equally favored.  Usually the love is mutual and at first sight—­nay, preferably before first sight.  The mere hearsay that a certain man or maiden is very beautiful suffices, as we saw in the story of Nala and Damayanti, to banish sleep and appetite, and to make the lover pale and wan and most wretched.  Sakuntala’s royal lover wastes away so rapidly that in a few days his bracelet falls from his attenuated arm, and Sakuntala herself becomes so weak that she cannot rise, and is supposed to have sunstroke!  Malati dwindles